2015 was a wild ride for the company formerly known as Google

Alphabet CEO Larry Page.
REUTERS/Chip East
In 2015, we bid goodbye to the idea of "Google" as a search engine with an ad business that gushered out so much money that it could fund crazy ideas like self-driving cars.

Although all the moonshots are still technically being funded by the money-spewing ads business and we won't get to see any additional financials until Alphabet's Q1 earnings report in January, it's still been a wild year for The Company Formerly Known As Google.

The good

On the stock side, Google soared.

A share of Alphabet stock will currently set you back nearly $750, up 42% from the ~$527 per share Google was fetching at the beginning of the year.

The bad and the ugly

First, The Wall Street Journal published excerpts of a 2012 Federal Trade Commission report that showed that some staff wanted to charge three parts of Google's business with antitrust violations, including illegally taking competitors' content. The FTC documents, which The Journal received accidentally after filing a Freedom of Information Act request, made Google look like a bully.

With a new corporate structure and a lot of messes left to be cleaned up overseas, as well as consistently vocal critics at home, it's been a turbulent year for Google. Here's to whatever new drama 2016 brings!